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The American painter cakes her canvases in heavy layers of gooey paint. This inaugural London show is a messy, exuberant celebration of her material, but some big messages are subtly embedded if you can scratch your way towards them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as a leading painters of her era – is all about texture, application, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced aesthetic geekery. If you get your kicks immersing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to keep you going for a while. But it’s Schutz’s grotesque, surreal, cartoony, metaphorical imagery that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the initial room are full of giant-headed cyclopses and roaring mobs. One piece shows a group of figures stomps senselessly toward an event outside the frame, brandishing fists and creating a path of trash in their path. In another presents a figure given a large disguise in some bizarre ceremony before a crowd of unattractive followers. It’s not hard to read any of this as political, as observation on America’s condition, on societal splits and furious, and mob mentality is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by Dana Schutz.

Changing Themes

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the leaders and elites, rather than the crowds that follow them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a religious figure and a man in green recline in gilded seats – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a landscape strewn with dead bodies, and a female figure, maybe Schutz herself, lies naked, forlorn and powerless in a bed.

Influences and Allusions

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, covered in allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the festive bizarre elements of James Ensor, the large-headed oddities of a contemporary artist. There are riffs on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a depiction of Handsome Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s sprinkled the works.

A Model by Dana Schutz.

Meaning and Stories

Painting this dense, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the symbolism of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the people in power, and the public that they provoke.

Controversy and Impact

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her painting Open Casket – a semi-abstracted depiction of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in a southern state in the mid-20th century – sparked immense debate when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist picketed the painting daily, and some called for it to be destroyed. An artist of European descent depicting – arguably with great sympathy – a scene of African-American suffering was the major headline of the biennial. This marked the height of the late 2010s culture wars, a period that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the identical team. In retrospect, in a world more divided, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this heartfelt, sorrowful painting.

Legacy and Current Work

It could have ruined her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But all her subsequent work now exists in its influence. She inevitably came out of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in brilliant, sickly, gloopy and deeply political painting at the top tier.